You’ve Never Seen Corals Like in the new Movie “Our Ocean, Our Future”

Our Ocean, Our Future is a new short film created by BioQuest Studios and the Tara Expeditions Foundation. You may recognize some of the visually stunning focus stacking technique in this film which was introduced by BioQuest Studios in their first coral short titled “Slow Life”.

This new film takes the photographic technique one step further using cinematic movements, higher-resolution cameras, and more advanced post production work. Our ocean, our future all comes with an important conservation message.

The film debuted last week at the United Nations Ocean Conference held in June 2017. The conference brings political leaders of nations together to address the alarming decline in the health of our oceans. However, the message is not just for people who make decisions at the highest levels of governments, instead, is meant to relay a message to all of humanity. We all need to understand how our lifestyles can damage the oceans and how we can avoid this by making simple decisions to alter our habits, politics, and the way we treat our planet.

“As the filmmaking team on board the Tara Pacific expedition, we had the chance to witness and document the consequences of unsustainable living and climate change across vast areas of the Pacific Ocean. Sadly, even the most isolated reefs Tara has visited during the 2016 leg were in severe decline.” – BioQuest Studios

Most areas visited during their expedition significantly affected by coral bleaching. To document the process of bleaching, the team had to devise a graphic method to depict the complex lifeform that builds the reefs – the coral. Coral, along with its microscopic symbionts, is an animal that lives in a world beyond our ordinary perception. Human vision is not tuned to see this world. We cannot appreciate it under its ambient light spectrum, focus on its microscopic polyps or visualize its behavior due to the slow pace of its existence.

BioQuest Studios turned to digital imaging techniques used in science to reveal the hidden beauty of this magnificent animal. The supermacro images are the highlight of over two years work by our team. Focus stacked time lapses went through hundreds of hours of computer processing to extend the depth of field, even more hours of deconvolution algorithms to extract the minute details from the sensor data, and they originated from over half a million high-resolution still images taken in our purpose built studios.

The colours featured in the video are not enhanced in any way. Coral pigmentation is fluorescent and therefore its appearance depends on the light spectrum the animal is immersed in. All images were captured simulating the ambient underwater spectra that would exist where the animal lives. Consequently, the colours are real!